{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Mostly Working","title":"Ep #18: Gabriella Hachem (CEO, Dessn): Design should be done in Production","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3630,"description":"Tom and Jonny sit down with Gabriella Hachem, co-founder of Dessn and the podcast’s first design tool founder. They dig into why Dessn runs your codebase in the cloud so you can design on production, unpack the read-only decision that shaped the product, and go behind the scenes of building a design tool while the models caught up.\nKey takeaways\nDessn runs your codebase in the cloud so you can design on top of the real thing. No local setup and no coding, and the page you pull onto the canvas is your production homepage rather than a representation of it. Gabriella has waited her whole career to open the real homepage and work on it.\nRead-only access to the repo was a focus decision before it was a security one. The first version of Dessn opened pull requests. They dropped it, because opening a PR isn’t the hard part anymore and it was never how they were going to win. Handoff now runs through MCP straight into Cursor or Claude Code.\nLeaving the engineering gate where it is smooths adoption. Workflows are already changing, and change is heavy even when it’s powerful. Keeping one familiar checkpoint untouched means a design team only has to renegotiate the part that actually matters.\nDessn’s ideal customer profile turned out to be a culture, which is a very hard thing to qualify for. Every usual deterministic signal failed: vertical, size, stage. The proxy Gabriella watches for is whether a design engineer role already exists on the team.\nAn excited user counts for nothing if leadership isn’t bought in. Gabriella has watched a deal die at that gate with the user still cheering for it. Nim is the one who says no, and she’s learning to, because you only have so much time and where you spend it matters.\nThe handoff only ever existed because designers couldn’t reach the code. Remove the skill barrier and you remove the reason for the relay. Fewer people between the decision-maker and the executor gets you higher quality output and more speed.\nRoles were built on...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/DQbx92WsPLEetVRjQ1jDmzGQo-63kvktRkfvWgcuqaY/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS8zMjhj/MzgzYThjOWNmN2Iz/NDcwZWRkMjA0ZjBh/N2E0Yy5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}